Mountain Moving TNT = Today Not Tomorrow!!
The reason that many of us have unfulfilled lives is because we fail to honor each moment as it passes. We oftentimes fail to do those things that we want to do or say those things that we want to say, because there's always a "next time" or a "someday" or a "when I get around to it", that all seem to minimize any of the tension that we may be feeling when an opportunity to expend possible fruit bearing energy presents itself. This is so because "next time" or "someday" or "when I get around to it" have become the very way we address the moment at hand. They have become habit patterns that immobilize us because they have become our very approach to life.
The only problem with this way of living is that you are not really living right here, right now, because your life is off somewhere in a future place. It is not really present because all your "next times", "somedays" and "when I get around to its" all represent a tomorrow which never comes. Or asked rhetorically, what is right now but all of your "some days" and "next times" and "when I get around to its" that all culminate in this moment?
In a more extreme example of the agreements we constantly make with ourselves about the nature of time, let's take a look at what I had to do to move beyond my paralysis. In touching my nose with my outstretched hand, for example, with no more than the weight of my therapist's finger tip applied against it, I felt like I was torturing myself the first few times I tried to do so. All I had to do to alleviate such pain was to stop pushing, to wait for the Proverbial Next Time.
Fortunately for me, however, the success books I had been reading had told me that if I wanted to get better that I had to make believe that tomorrow would never come. As a result, I pulled from the deepest places within, all the while pretending that I would not get a second chance to make the movements that were requested of me . And sure enough, in time, all of the motions I was asked to make got easier and easier. It was in this context that I began to rethink many of the other choices I was making about time.
. When I then got back out into the "real world", I found that most people seemed to act as if NOW drug on forever. If this describes you, don't despair, for no matter how deeply embedded your inclination may be to put things off, you can take comfort in knowing that there is a way out. As we move through this chapter you will be given tools that can help you make your life more of a celebration of NOW!
If you are, however, saying that none of the above describes you, but something is keeping you from reaching your goals, maybe you're guilty of waiting for the right time to make your move. Maybe you feel it is better to wait until the kids get off to school or at that happier time when you've lost a few more pounds (which could very well never happen and is another way of putting it off all together) or on Jan. 1, when the New Year kicks in.
I can illustrate how there is never a right time to begin anything with how the old me approached my first bike ride across the US. In waiting for the time to be right, I kept putting that ride off until the days became weeks and then months until it was already summer when I finally hit the eastern road. My "grand bike journey" almost never happened because there was always a little more training that I needed, or an item I needed for my bike, or a little bit more information that I had to collect or someone that I had to help with a project of their own until the longer I deliberated, the more things there were that were incomplete.
It wasn't until I stopped waiting for everything to be perfect that I finally began my ride. As I pedaled east, I asked myself over and over what was so hard about what I was doing. Why had I kept finding other things to consider? Soon, I discovered that just thinking about it is really the hardest part of most any undertaking. When you finally begin to actualize your own thoughts, you too will understand the actualizing power of the words that the shoe company, Nike, has made famous:
In my own case, I was the consummate Non Doer who led by the perfect example of unfulfilled potential. I had been that way all my life because I always thought there was plenty of time. It wasn't until my car wreck showed me the transitory nature of NOW that I really began to show my world what I was capable of.
Maybe the mountains you want to move are not as glamorous as some of mine have been. Maybe you are plagued by one of life's smaller bumps and bruises and you want to change some of the habits that keep you from moving beyond it. Suppose, for example, you know you want to quit smoking but you are waiting for the right time to do so. Let me ask you, then, what is wrong with quitting right now?
How, you ask?
If you want to lose weight and you stop eating after six in the evening, that may be your way of getting started. If you know you need more exercise and you go out and walk around the block that may very well be how you walk two times around it the next day and so on. And remember to congratulate yourself, for just the very act of getting started is a victory on your part. The key here is to do something to get you started. Later in this chapter, we'll talk about how to stay with any of those new habits you may adopt.
Which brings us to the next hurdle to overcome in effectively working with the Psychology of Now. It is the size of the project, many of which are just too big to do right now, this very moment. In order to feel like you're winning at the game of life in the presence of all the larger time gobblers that make up our daily living, you need to do what you can.
The way to do so is to break those bigger undertakings into smaller parts that are manageable by you. Doing so will help you feel more in control as you stay in the now because you will have also figured out a way to do something about the large projects that may compete for your attention.
So how does one feel like he or she is a victor when there's so much to do, so little time to do any of it and many of those things demanding our energy can't possibly be all done at once even if we do manage to get them broken down into their smaller component parts?
To answer this, let's take a project that is just one of life's smaller aches and pains. Suppose, for example, your bicycle has a flat tire and you just want to get it fixed. Every time you think about your unhealthy wheel a feeling of heaviness comes over your body because you don't see where that hour or two that you are going to need to get it fixed is going to be available to you.
To get around this dilemma, you will need to see how you can break your problem down into those steps you will need to take. To do this, it is helpful to get some quality quiet time (bigger projects will obviously require more such time, I talk about what this kind of time is like in the chapter entitled "Alone Time") to think the project through. Since most of us have probably fixed a flat tire on a bicycle before, the appropriate sequence of events necessary to remedy the problem will come to us in just a few moments of focused such thinking. In looking at your faulty wheel in this way, you will see what you need to do to win a little bit each day.
Your list of daily mini projects might look like this:
Day One: Take off the wheel
(Hint: If you leave it in a conspicuous place, like near your front door, you will be forced to do something to it each day. If you keep the project close to you, you will more readily attend to it.)
Day Two: Extract the tube, pump it up and mark the puncture.
Day Three: Patch the hole.
Day Four: Put the tube and tire back on to the rim and inflate it to its correct pressure.
Day Five: Let the wheel sit for a day to make sure it holds air.
Day Six: Celebrate as you put your happy wheel back on to the bike and complete the job.
By seeing the whole task first in your mind's eye, you move the whole project forward with greater ease. You anticipate any problems that may arise before hand and see ways around them. You may, for example, in the case of the flat tire above, find that you will have to add in a day to purchase the tire irons you will need. You may even determine that your time would be better spent buying a new tube instead of patching your old one. If either of the above are true, you could simply add a day in for a trip to the bike shop.
When you do something, anything, about all those things that compete for your attention, even if it's just making a note of it (we will talk about the actualizing power of keeping lists in the chapter entitled, "Write It Down") you will soon find yourself traveling down the road called fulfillment. This is so because you will begin to feel like your life is not spinning haphazardly out of control.
And to keep you from feeling like a failure for not being able to follow through with that which you have begun, always build a daily taste of success into your plans. Make sure you can measure your results each and every day in a way in which you know that you have been successful.
In learning how to win with time over the longer run, let's take a look at some of those who didn't. I have worked in and worked out in health clubs since 1980. During that time, I have seen a lot of people come and go. I've seen the New Year's resolution crowds come and go, I've seen countless buddy systems fail, I've seen the moms and the daughters and the Fathers and the sons achieve vibrant health only to then become soft and out of shape in a very short time, and have even watched the body's of alcoholics go from flabby to competitive to flabby again.
Why can't any of these people hang with it, you ask. The reasons are many as we will explore here.
There are there burn outs. These people push far more weight than they should be pushing without first working up to it or they do far too many reps or sets for muscles that are new to weight lifting. They want the body they've seen in the muscle magazines and they want it now without figuring out a way to be happy with what they've achieved on a daily basis so that they can take that success into the next day, week, month and year. Many such failures would not have come and gone so quickly if they had known that the health club experience is a way of life, that there is plenty of time to achieve their goals if they just make a habit out of working out on a regular basis.
There are the ones who think they need a workout partner. While it is always fun and oftentimes beneficial to train with someone else, coming to depend on someone else for your own habits can be a trap. In the sense that life and the ability to chart your own course in it all really begin and end with you, it is not wise to give so much of your power away in this way.
In my many years of pondering over what happened to this so and so and that so and so, I have devised a simple way to make the buddy system work. In the case of gym partners, this could work with anyone you have come to depend on to help you achieve your goals, try to build solo workouts into your schedule. This way, if one or the other of you gets sick or cannot make it to the gym for some other reason, you will still know what to do to get the daily taste of success you need when they are not there.
I have watched the habit pattern of coming become the habit pattern of not coming. When I used to open the gym up at 5 in the morning, there was always a crowd of familiar faces waiting to get in. So familiar that I knew their walk and could almost predict what a lot them would be wearing and how they would greet me.
Because the gym I worked at was so large, I wouldn't know that any of these people had been absent from the morning roll call until months sometimes years later when I would see them at a shopping center or other such public place in an all together different part of town. No matter how much time had passed, we always seemed to recognize each other almost immediately. When I asked them what had happened to them, their embarrassed answers would often be some variation of their missing a couple of days, which became a week then a month until they no longer went to the gym at all. They had obviously established a new habit pattern with their lives, they feel out of the groove of something they knew that had once been a good, positive and important part of their lives.
We all fall into various grooves with our lives. And many of them that are good for us, go against the grain of how many of us choose to live our lives. Most people, for example, have a hard time getting out of a warm bed for an early morning walk or a gym work out, to do yoga or to begin that long proposed book they have wanted to write. That is the groove they have worn.
Those of us who have chosen success, however, or, in other words, those of us who are doing the kinds of things unsuccessful people don't want to do, realize that we must be content to be different than most. We must also be aware that the apple cart of good habits is very easily upset. It is very tenuous and many well intentioned people and things that could be worthy of our energy can knock us of it.
If you want to get up earlier on a daily basis, even if it's just during the days of the working week, we must be wary of who or what it is that can pull us off our path. Maybe it's a TV program that everyone else seems to be watching or an ended meeting that no one wants to leave or a phone call that wants to drag on forever. Whatever it is, we must constantly be on guard against those things that could keep us from making the earlier bed time that most of us will need to awaken at that earlier hour we may have designated.
On my bike rides across the US, for example, which always took place during the hot summer months, most everyone that I encountered was recreating.
In 1979 when I was such a novelty for being a TransAm cyclist, I received many invitations to spend nights on the town, go on water skiing outings or attend dinner parties. Quickly, after passing through just a few states, I learned the danger of accepting any such well meaning fun.
The morning after, which by the way, never failed to come, always found me less than eager to get back on my bike. I rode far fewer miles. I enjoyed the riding much less and I was unusually tired. I began to understand what was meant by the winner's edge, only because I no longer felt motivated to continue my ride. Instead of merrily powering through any obstacles I knew the ride would present and looking forward to the adventure that each new day would bring, I had to push myself just to make it from one town to the next.
In such instances I often would catch myself wondering why I couldn't just let myself sit around and drink beer and do nothing like everyone else. While my hosts were always off looking for other ways to achieve their goal of having a fun time, my goal of making it all the way across the USA on a bicycle felt a lot less possible. It wasn't until I resolved to wait until I reached the east coast to open up to other kinds of fun that my ride became powerful.
It also wasn't until I began to look at my bike ride as a series of appointments that I was making with myself on a daily basis that I began to see why it was important for me to be wide awake open and fresh for each new day. In a grand sense, one could see my bike ride across America as a huge appointment I had made with myself. Obviously, life's every day challenges may not be as extreme but you can move any of those bothersome molehills or towering mountains of your own by making appointments with yourself.
If, for example, you want to read more, pick a slot of time at night when you are going to read and do nothing else. Just as you make an appointment to visit your dentist or your beautician and you wouldn't think of letting those people down, make appointments with yourself to do any of those things that you have been putting off. Whether it's regular evening walks, riding your bike to work or that journal that you've been long wanting to write, resolve not to let anything else fill such time slots because you will be letting down the most important person in your world -- YOU.
Just as appointments will help you clear out any unneeded distraction, they will help you overcome your own personal inertia and you can use them to stay on any new habit track. It also helps to know when to make them. If your challenge is modest, such as starting a small vegetable garden, you can usually schedule time for it when you know you will be home and when there is daylight. If, however, your undertaking requires absolute total commitment and concentration on your part, you will need to schedule prime time for yourself.
Suppose it's a piece of art or a book that you want to create, You will need to schedule such activity at a time when the phones aren't ringing or the kids aren't competing for your attention. For many of us, that time is early morning. As I write this book, for example, it is now 5:30 AM. Getting to this place on a daily basis has required that I build my day around it.
Whenever I begin a new book project, however, for the first few weeks, there is always some resistance to getting up in the very early morning hours. The way that I overcome it is to prepare myself mentally the evening before by having all of the clothes I will be wearing (when I used to have an office downtown, I had everything that I would be taking with me prepared ahead of time, my lunch was prepared, my bags were packed, my bike was parked and ready to go near the front door) in neat little stacks next to my bed. I even leave the computer on overnight and have the chapter I am working on and the exact place I am working in it already up on the screen. There are others of us who find that their prime time is late at night after everyone else has gone to bed. To be effective at this time, such people may find that an afternoon nap will give them the staying power they may need. They may also have to coach any of those who may want to call or visit at this time that they are not to be interrupted.
Any distraction that may compete for your attention when you get to prime time should be removed before hand. If for example the only place you have to do art is in the kitchen and the dirty dishes always bother you, never do them during prime time --always make sure to do them before such special time arrives.
Now that we're all authorities on how time really passes, what is keeping you from seizing the moment? You for example, don't have to waste all the time I did to learn about the very transitory nature of NOW. I ask you, then, to use the example of my life to make the most of your own, NOW.
By way of illustration, armed with an urgency to how I NOW view the NOW, I accomplished more in the first three years after my two-month coma, clinical death and paralysis than I had accomplished in the 24 years that led up to it. How I view the moment is how I view life -- with a reverence and appreciation that I had not before known.
If I could move the mountains that I moved just to get to life's starting line, just think what you can do. Toward that end, I will share one last urgency invoking tool with you. I've saved it for last because I feel it is the most important tool you can use.
In my own experience, in order to get to a better understanding of NOW, I let three very important words work their magic on me. They moved me along to a life that better understood how time passed and to a life that felt a lot more rich, fulfilled and complete. They are:
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